Enlightenment
by Junsui Kegasu
Summary: It was his own personal snow globe, he realized, eyes widening in amusement. His own winter wonderland was right before his eyes. Then he had to strain to think – what did heartheavy people do in their winter wonderlands?


Even a place so dank and disgusting as that world jammed around the only inhabitable space for many, many days of gummi travel could look serene with a fine and slowly thickening veneer of snow coating its wretched rooftops and sinisterly pointed peaks. Demyx smiled, empty as an actors but as convincing as the best's. Snow this white – this pure – had to be a good omen somehow, never mind the blistering cold and the slippery patches of invisible ice that had made him, not quite as graceful as he liked to give himself credit for, fly and sputter until his back smacked into the cold ground with a dull thud.

Bruised, but still entranced, he decided, looking shielding his eyes from the imminent onslaught of – although frozen – stinging water into his eyes. Just because it was his element didn't make him completely immune to the unpleasant sensation one usually got when opening their eyes beneath water. He was, after all (the remains of) a human. The skyline ahead of him, though it was still its obscene mixture of swirling clouds and dark light, seemed almost alive with the swirling mass that fell from it. Even though The World That Never Was usually was dark, aided only by the fluorescent lighting existing only to mock the fact that _nobody_ lived there. There were no visitors, either, at least not ones with any form of intelligence.

Often, the sandy blonde wished that there would be visitors other than the heartless, and he sighed as he squished a particularly small shadow beneath his boot. That was why, while everyone else was inside their rooms, safely warmed by a make-shift heating system involving Axel, Xaldin, and a metal tube. Why they didn't want to spend such an intriguing day outside was behind him – even Vexen had turned an uninterested eye after he ran outside and took a few dozen observations to conclude that there wasn't anything special about the cause of this weather – it just sort of happened.

He was alone in enjoying this, but he found that he didn't really mind, still staring up at the sky. The snow above him was swirling down, dizzying but beautiful. A large pile had collected between the juts of architecture and clung to the structure defiantly, giving a normally intimidating structure certain serenity. He smiled up, almost not acting, and shook some of the snow from his hair that collected there before continuing on.

It was his own personal snow globe, he realized, eyes widening in amusement. His own winter wonderland was right before his eyes. Then he had to strain to think – what did heart-heavy people do in their winter wonderlands? He had only seen examples in old, faded picture books that had somehow managed to circulate their way into the library. The fact that they were thin and had numerous pictures caught his eye, but he had only seen one example of what to do.

During his ponders of what to do, Demyx realized that he had made it to the L-shaped alleyway connecting their world to the reality-bending stabilizer between reality and unbelievable. He looked around, as if to make sure he was alone, and only saw his boot prints, sharp and defined. He looked forward once more, the tip of his tongue poking out between two cold-chapped lips in concentrated before he leaped, twisting gracefully and landing flat on his back in the snow, making sketchy imprint of his body shape beneath him and excess powder fluff up around him before settling in misty layers all over his coat. Around him, the footprints were at least three feet away.

Perfect.

He swept his arms upward, stretched gracefully at angles not too far from perpendicular to the rest of his body, and then let his legs continue the same motion for as wide as his coat would allow. He did it twice more slowly before he began to move almost compulsively for a few seconds. Then and only then, he sat up and twisted around and then debated on how to get out of this mess without ruining it. He carefully climbed to his feet, the snow that he had packed beneath him from jumping too hardened to allow a print to form, and jumped out, landing a bit away from his last set of footsteps. Demyx whirled around, causing the snow collected on his coat (some of which that had melted into dew) to fly behind him, directed by the wind the loose bits of his coat caused.

Before him, crude and childish but positively ingenious, lay the imprint of an angel in the snow, just as picturesque as the ones in the children's books he had leafed through in the library, but just as real as those pictures couldn't have even began to depict. It was special, and childish, and dumb, and monumental, all rolled up into one and packed down so that you couldn't see the difference anymore.

Because even nobodies can be angels. And Demyx smiled.

-

Done for somebody on dA.


End file.
